Evening Brief: Classes in Ontario cancelled for rest of school year

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Good evening, readers.

School is officially done for the year for Ontario’s 2 million students.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced Tuesday that students would not return to school until at least the fall, though there would be a voluntary summer school.

Staying with Queen’s Park, the Ontario government will launch an “independent commission” to examine the province’s long-term care system, Minister Merrilee Fullerton says — but the probe will not be the public inquiry that some have called for.

The announcement was made by Fullerton’s office via press release on Tuesday morning, shortly before MPPs converged for an in-person sitting and question period at Queen’s Park. NDP leader Andrea Horwath is expected to put forward a motion in the early afternoon calling for a public inquiry — which is a process defined in Ontario under legislation — into long-term care.

The Trudeau government’s nominee for the Auditor General of Canada says she is seeking long-term and predictable funding for her office, as resourcing constraints continue to leave the watchdog unable to carry out all its audits on time.

Karen Hogan, whose nomination as the next auditor general was announced on May 13, told the House public accounts committee on Tuesday that she will have to continue the effort by Ricard and late auditor general Michael Ferguson in pushing for both long-term and short-term funding.

A deadly stabbing at a Toronto erotic massage parlour three months ago is now being treated as an act of terrorism after police allegedly uncovered evidence it was inspired by misogynist incel ideology.

Charges against the suspect accused of carrying out the Feb. 24 attack, which killed a woman and injured another, were updated in court on Tuesday to “murder — terrorist activity.”

The federal government’s new agri-food pilot program gives too much power to employers and won’t be accessible for labourers hoping to gain permanent residence status, migrants workers’ advocates say.

Syed Hussan, the executive director of the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, said the pilot is a “slap in the face” to migrant workers who have been deemed essential during the coronavirus shutdowns.

The first human clinical trials in Canada for a vaccine to COVID-19 should be underway in the country within weeks, which – if the candidate proves successful – could start a short as a several months long process towards readying the product for Canadian production.

U.S. President Donald Trump is giving the World Health Organization (WHO) an ultimatum to either commit to “substantive improvements” or risk losing millions and U.S. membership altogether. He made the demand in a letter to the head of the WHO that criticizes stages of the body’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic since December. (BBC News)

A Chinese laboratory is developing a drug that it believes has the power to bring the coronavirus pandemic to a halt. The drug being tested by scientists at China’s prestigious Peking University could not only shorten the recovery time for those infected, but even offer short-term immunity from the virus, according to researchers. “When we injected neutralizing antibodies into infected mice, after five days the viral load was reduced by a factor of 2,500,” said Sunney Xie, director of the university’s Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Genomics. (Agence France-Presse)

The family of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has donated US$4.7 million to National Public Radio newsrooms in the Midwest and California as the economic fallout from the pandemic wreaks havoc on the local news industry. “Now more than ever, we depend on high-quality journalism for timely and critical information,” Eric Schmidt’s wife, Wendy Schmidt, said in a statement to NPR. (The Hill)

Brazil now has the third-highest number of COVID-19 cases in the world, according to official figures released Monday, a troubling surge for a country struggling to respond to the pandemic. With 254,220 confirmed cases, Brazil has surpassed Britain, Spain and Italy in the past 72 hours on the list of total infections, and is behind only the United States (1.5 million) and Russia (290,000). (AFP)